Life on the ocean wave with NSRI

Writer & Photographer Elaine Davie

If you’ve grown up in Hermanus and the ocean is in your blood, in the air that you breathe; if you’ve swum in it, surfed its waves, fished and body boarded, and if you have an urge to give back to your community, then the National Sea Rescue Institute (NSRI) is probably the answer.

That was certainly the conclusion reached by André Barnard, who signed up as a trainee volunteer nine years ago with NSRI Station 17 in Hermanus. Last year he became Station Commander. With some trepidation, he stepped into the giant sea boots of the legendary Deon Langenhoven, who, as André puts it, had been there since Noah launched the Ark.

“From the very first day I enlisted as a trainee in 2011, I fell in love with it,” he remembers. “There are about 20 of us at the station at the moment, including seven trainees, and we are a tightly-knit family. Like a family, we work together, fight together and most of all, have huge amounts of fun together. This can be dangerous work, so it’s absolutely essential that you know and trust the person you’re working alongside. When you’ve experienced everything the ocean can throw at you, it’s difficult to describe the feeling to outsiders, but you know that members of your own team share it.”

The NSRI is a unique organisation in that it is manned entirely by volunteers who are willing to risk their lives for others for no monetary gain. More than 50 years old, it was launched in Cape Town in 1967 as the South African In-Shore Rescue Service (SAISRS), soon changing its name to the National Sea Rescue Institute.

Its first volunteers were Captain Bob Deacon and Ray Lant, and their boat, a 4.7m inflatable vessel named Snoopy was donated by the Society of Master Mariners. Today there are 41 stations along the South African coast and at inland dams.

NSRI Station 17 in Hermanus was established in 1978 and one of the things that André particularly admires about it is its non-discriminatory attitude. “A life is a life,” he emphasises. “We will answer a call to assist any person or animal in distress in the water and will throw everything we have into saving their lives. In fact, some of our most interesting activations have been to disentangle Southern Right whales from the ropes and fishing tackle that imprisoned and threatened to kill them.”

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